Since they say recording them is illegal wiretapping, I guess when they make a traffic stop (which is recorded by their vehicle camera, often with audio provided through their radio mic), they are illegally wiretapping during the arrest. Seems pretty simple to me. Since they have set a pretty clear precedent in Illinois that recording an arrest (even for your own defense) is illegal, then it pretty clearly is illegal to record an arrest in support of the prosecution.
I was at HP when they did this. They didn't make much of a secret that it was being done to try and drive people away from the company to reduce headcount. I suppose it worked to some extent, as many of the people that were "recalled" were working at remote locations where it was impossible for them to commute to an office location. Those people were effectively laid-off, and without getting the nice HP severance package normally received for the major lay-offs HP was doing at the time.
All I can say is I'm glad that I am out of there. HP is still doing anything they can to make it a miserable place to work so people will leave. Last I heard they just eliminating almost all year-end vacation roll-over (Merry Christmas, employees).
I suspect AT&T will start doing some of this kind of thing now. It is much cheaper for them if employees quit out of frustration then if they have to give them a lay-off package. I suspect they'll see a few more of these "changes" that don't seem to make sense until you look at it as a headcount reduction method.
This expectations of better efficiency are laughably unrealistic in the actual world. If your "smart" car starts to slow down because of traffic congestion out of sight ahead, how many "normal" cars (or even better, "normal" hybrid cars) are going to slow down behind you? Not as many as are going to pass you. Once they pull in front of you, that "slow down" calculation is going to need to adjust for more cars in front of you and slow down more, exacerbating the problem.
Also, these efficiency increases only occur on "smart" roadways, which even in the most wired future will never be placed everywhere.
This system would only approach the stated efficiencies if *every* car on the road used it and *every* road was made to be "smart". Frankly, I find the hybrid (and almost every other) approaches to improved automotive efficiency more realistic and less costly alternatives.
Please, oh please, Mr. Lucas, tell me you would base these on one or more of the existing series of Star Wars novels set in that timeframe, many of which were well written and thought out. I wouldn't presume to recommend anything specific, as I've only read a few (good and bad), but there is a lot of worthwhile material out there. It would be a tremendous disservice to both those authors and your fans to disregard or ignore it!
My brother-in-law had a string of really terrible summer jobs to help pay for school. After his second year, he took a job tarring roofs all summer (not the best time to be messing about with tar). He hated it so much that the following summer he decided to take a job with a chicken processing plant. His job--and I am not making this up--was cleaning the de-feathering and beheading room.
This might just sound bad, but the reality of it was much worse. The chickens would enter the room upside-down with their legs held to a chain in an assembly-line-like fashion. They would then be manuvered into something resembling a band-saw which would relieve them of their heads. They would then be manuvered around the room to a system that would remove the feathers (and this isn't entirely clear, but apparently it involved water and electricity), bleeding out as they went. Now, by the end of a typical two-shift work day, the floor of this room was 24-36 inches deep in conjealed blood, effluence, and feathers. Since nothing is wasted, those responsible for cleaning this room were required to use snow shovels to chop this lovely gelatin into rough cubes which were then shoveled into a system used to reclaim as many feathers as possible (I assume through some sort of washing), and god knows what else. This shoveling would take about 6 hours. The remaining 2 hours of their shift would be spent using a pressure washer and steam cleaner to get everything the shovels missed and make the room neat and clean.
I guess the job paid pretty well, and he could've gone back the following summer and been promoted to cleaning the ominously-named "de-thigher", but he decided to spend that last summer going back to tarring roofs.
I was diagnosed with ADD/WO (ADHD without the H) in 1987, and have been treated with Adderall since 1992. It has been used to treat adult variants of ADD since atleast 1988 (and possibly earlier). Developed about 30 years ago as a reformulation of Dexedrine, Adderall (originally called Obetrol) is a combination of four amphetamine salts: Dextroamphetamine Saccharate, Amphetamine Aspartate, Dextroamphetamine Sulfate, and Amphetamine Sulfate. A generic has been available atleast as long as I've been taking it (11+ years now). Personally, I find the side effects of Adderall dramatically milder than those of Ritalin (which I took for 5 years prior to starting on Adderall).
I believe the confusion surrounding when Adderall first saw use as an ADD treatment stems from the FDA's decision in 1994 that they needed to reapprove Adderall as a distinctive drug instead of simply allowing it to be treated as a reformulation of Dexedrine (as they has been doing since its original release in the '70s). Anyone taking Adderall prior to this decision (in November, 1994) was permitted to continue taking it, but it was unavailable for treatment of new patients until its re-approval was finalized in 1996. The FDA's decision to do this re-approval was probably influenced by the purchase of the manufacturer of Obetrol by Richwood Pharmaceuticals and their subsequent decision to rename it Adderall and target it at the ADD/ADHD market in the early '90s.
I know this is a bit off-topic and may seem somewhat inflamatory, but I really feel I need to respond to this.
Implying that the moon landings were a hoax is foolish at best, but more so very insulting to the thousands of people involved in the project and the dozens of astronauts that risked (and in some cases lost) their lives for it. I'm not going to say any more about this except to recommend that you read Philip Plait's Bad Astronomy web site, more specifically the section on Moon Landing Hoax theories.
Regarding the use of the Saturn V booster since SkyLab... Why? Whilst these were powerful and flexible boosters and had a perfect launch record, they did not have a perfect test record and it was only a matter of time before a launch accident occured (which, I might add, could have been catostrophic at and around the launch pad). They were also pretty expensive and difficult to operate. I highly recommend you take a look at one of the Saturn Vehicle Histories you'll find on-line. If you have any lingering doubts as to the existance of the F-1 or the Saturn V, there are still some in existance you might want to have a look at for yourself.
In regards to the Tampa area project, I didn't see anything on their page about the salinity of the waste water from the desalination process. Could this create problems?...
There is some reference to this in the Yahoo! article. Apparently, they are directing the "brine" into a river or the like. This plant won't cause any problems, but if they build too many more dumping into the same place it might, so they are spending some money on long-term monitoring of the waste effects.
Actually, HP has been offering RedHat AS for their Itanium boxes for quite a while now, along with HP-UX and Windows 64-bit Enterprise Server (the price difference between HP-UX and Linux has always been negligable, but Windows adds substancially to the final system price). The only thing new here was the same Linux software and support is now being offered for the 32-bit Intel hardware.
It looks like Lindows might get some more ammunition in the form of some precident from this Supreme Court case as reporting in Yahoo! today. Apparently Victoria's Secret sued a company called Victor's Secret (which seems pretty similar to me). Applicable excerpt from the article:
There is no question that Victoria's Secret has a well-known and valuable trade name, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the court. However, the mere fact that a consumer might think of the big company when encountering a similar or knockoff name is not enough to establish a trademark violation, Stevens wrote.
I seem to recall (from some of my copious SciFi reading) that a key problem to long term and widespread use of fusion is actually from waste heat. Since a fusion reactor would generate temperatures in the millions of degrees Kelvin, and since any generation system will capture only a fraction of that heat for conversion to other forms of energy (albeit how much I don't pretend to know), the remaining heat needs to be disposed of. This will probably occur through a complex series of coolant mechanisms that all boil down to radiation into the atmosphere. How long before that added heat starts to become a problem?
I'm no physicist (although I'm married to one, but she isn't handy right now), so if one would care to reply and correct me or back me up, I welcome it.
I would highly recommend Qt (from TrollTech). I have used it for several C++ cross-platform projects (across HP-UX, Linux, and Win32), and I've been very successful with using Qt and very happy with Troll's support.
While I can see benefits for also using GCC on each platform, I have found that sticking to the commercial compiler for the system in question (ie. Visual C++ on Windows, SunPro on Solaris, etc.) generally produces faster code, since it sounds like that may be an issue for you. Qt is generally pretty flexible when it comes to this so you should be OK whatever you use.
I would not recommend Java if performance or reliability is at all an issue. Performance because Java just isn't there yet. Reliability (and supportability) because you're going to be adding an extra layer of support issues for any problems you run into with the JRE component for each and every platform you need to support.
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Since they say recording them is illegal wiretapping, I guess when they make a traffic stop (which is recorded by their vehicle camera, often with audio provided through their radio mic), they are illegally wiretapping during the arrest. Seems pretty simple to me. Since they have set a pretty clear precedent in Illinois that recording an arrest (even for your own defense) is illegal, then it pretty clearly is illegal to record an arrest in support of the prosecution.
The subject says it all... Anyone know what all 12 of these states are?
Thread Time by Norton and DiPasquale is older, but pretty good.
I was at HP when they did this. They didn't make much of a secret that it was being done to try and drive people away from the company to reduce headcount. I suppose it worked to some extent, as many of the people that were "recalled" were working at remote locations where it was impossible for them to commute to an office location. Those people were effectively laid-off, and without getting the nice HP severance package normally received for the major lay-offs HP was doing at the time.
All I can say is I'm glad that I am out of there. HP is still doing anything they can to make it a miserable place to work so people will leave. Last I heard they just eliminating almost all year-end vacation roll-over (Merry Christmas, employees).
I suspect AT&T will start doing some of this kind of thing now. It is much cheaper for them if employees quit out of frustration then if they have to give them a lay-off package. I suspect they'll see a few more of these "changes" that don't seem to make sense until you look at it as a headcount reduction method.
I remember SoftGrid from the first time I saw it... 20 years ago when it was called X Window.
This expectations of better efficiency are laughably unrealistic in the actual world. If your "smart" car starts to slow down because of traffic congestion out of sight ahead, how many "normal" cars (or even better, "normal" hybrid cars) are going to slow down behind you? Not as many as are going to pass you. Once they pull in front of you, that "slow down" calculation is going to need to adjust for more cars in front of you and slow down more, exacerbating the problem. Also, these efficiency increases only occur on "smart" roadways, which even in the most wired future will never be placed everywhere. This system would only approach the stated efficiencies if *every* car on the road used it and *every* road was made to be "smart". Frankly, I find the hybrid (and almost every other) approaches to improved automotive efficiency more realistic and less costly alternatives.
Please, oh please, Mr. Lucas, tell me you would base these on one or more of the existing series of Star Wars novels set in that timeframe, many of which were well written and thought out. I wouldn't presume to recommend anything specific, as I've only read a few (good and bad), but there is a lot of worthwhile material out there. It would be a tremendous disservice to both those authors and your fans to disregard or ignore it!
My brother-in-law had a string of really terrible summer jobs to help pay for school. After his second year, he took a job tarring roofs all summer (not the best time to be messing about with tar). He hated it so much that the following summer he decided to take a job with a chicken processing plant. His job--and I am not making this up--was cleaning the de-feathering and beheading room.
This might just sound bad, but the reality of it was much worse. The chickens would enter the room upside-down with their legs held to a chain in an assembly-line-like fashion. They would then be manuvered into something resembling a band-saw which would relieve them of their heads. They would then be manuvered around the room to a system that would remove the feathers (and this isn't entirely clear, but apparently it involved water and electricity), bleeding out as they went. Now, by the end of a typical two-shift work day, the floor of this room was 24-36 inches deep in conjealed blood, effluence, and feathers. Since nothing is wasted, those responsible for cleaning this room were required to use snow shovels to chop this lovely gelatin into rough cubes which were then shoveled into a system used to reclaim as many feathers as possible (I assume through some sort of washing), and god knows what else. This shoveling would take about 6 hours. The remaining 2 hours of their shift would be spent using a pressure washer and steam cleaner to get everything the shovels missed and make the room neat and clean.
I guess the job paid pretty well, and he could've gone back the following summer and been promoted to cleaning the ominously-named "de-thigher", but he decided to spend that last summer going back to tarring roofs.
I was diagnosed with ADD/WO (ADHD without the H) in 1987, and have been treated with Adderall since 1992. It has been used to treat adult variants of ADD since atleast 1988 (and possibly earlier). Developed about 30 years ago as a reformulation of Dexedrine, Adderall (originally called Obetrol) is a combination of four amphetamine salts: Dextroamphetamine Saccharate, Amphetamine Aspartate, Dextroamphetamine Sulfate, and Amphetamine Sulfate. A generic has been available atleast as long as I've been taking it (11+ years now). Personally, I find the side effects of Adderall dramatically milder than those of Ritalin (which I took for 5 years prior to starting on Adderall).
I believe the confusion surrounding when Adderall first saw use as an ADD treatment stems from the FDA's decision in 1994 that they needed to reapprove Adderall as a distinctive drug instead of simply allowing it to be treated as a reformulation of Dexedrine (as they has been doing since its original release in the '70s). Anyone taking Adderall prior to this decision (in November, 1994) was permitted to continue taking it, but it was unavailable for treatment of new patients until its re-approval was finalized in 1996. The FDA's decision to do this re-approval was probably influenced by the purchase of the manufacturer of Obetrol by Richwood Pharmaceuticals and their subsequent decision to rename it Adderall and target it at the ADD/ADHD market in the early '90s.
I know this is a bit off-topic and may seem somewhat inflamatory, but I really feel I need to respond to this.
Implying that the moon landings were a hoax is foolish at best, but more so very insulting to the thousands of people involved in the project and the dozens of astronauts that risked (and in some cases lost) their lives for it. I'm not going to say any more about this except to recommend that you read Philip Plait's Bad Astronomy web site, more specifically the section on Moon Landing Hoax theories.
Regarding the use of the Saturn V booster since SkyLab... Why? Whilst these were powerful and flexible boosters and had a perfect launch record, they did not have a perfect test record and it was only a matter of time before a launch accident occured (which, I might add, could have been catostrophic at and around the launch pad). They were also pretty expensive and difficult to operate. I highly recommend you take a look at one of the Saturn Vehicle Histories you'll find on-line. If you have any lingering doubts as to the existance of the F-1 or the Saturn V, there are still some in existance you might want to have a look at for yourself.
In regards to the Tampa area project, I didn't see anything on their page about the salinity of the waste water from the desalination process. Could this create problems? ...
There is some reference to this in the Yahoo! article. Apparently, they are directing the "brine" into a river or the like. This plant won't cause any problems, but if they build too many more dumping into the same place it might, so they are spending some money on long-term monitoring of the waste effects.
Actually, HP has been offering RedHat AS for their Itanium boxes for quite a while now, along with HP-UX and Windows 64-bit Enterprise Server (the price difference between HP-UX and Linux has always been negligable, but Windows adds substancially to the final system price). The only thing new here was the same Linux software and support is now being offered for the 32-bit Intel hardware.
It looks like Lindows might get some more ammunition in the form of some precident from this Supreme Court case as reporting in Yahoo! today. Apparently Victoria's Secret sued a company called Victor's Secret (which seems pretty similar to me). Applicable excerpt from the article:
There is no question that Victoria's Secret has a well-known and valuable trade name, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the court. However, the mere fact that a consumer might think of the big company when encountering a similar or knockoff name is not enough to establish a trademark violation, Stevens wrote.
I seem to recall (from some of my copious SciFi reading) that a key problem to long term and widespread use of fusion is actually from waste heat. Since a fusion reactor would generate temperatures in the millions of degrees Kelvin, and since any generation system will capture only a fraction of that heat for conversion to other forms of energy (albeit how much I don't pretend to know), the remaining heat needs to be disposed of. This will probably occur through a complex series of coolant mechanisms that all boil down to radiation into the atmosphere. How long before that added heat starts to become a problem?
I'm no physicist (although I'm married to one, but she isn't handy right now), so if one would care to reply and correct me or back me up, I welcome it.
I would highly recommend Qt (from TrollTech). I have used it for several C++ cross-platform projects (across HP-UX, Linux, and Win32), and I've been very successful with using Qt and very happy with Troll's support.
While I can see benefits for also using GCC on each platform, I have found that sticking to the commercial compiler for the system in question (ie. Visual C++ on Windows, SunPro on Solaris, etc.) generally produces faster code, since it sounds like that may be an issue for you. Qt is generally pretty flexible when it comes to this so you should be OK whatever you use.
I would not recommend Java if performance or reliability is at all an issue. Performance because Java just isn't there yet. Reliability (and supportability) because you're going to be adding an extra layer of support issues for any problems you run into with the JRE component for each and every platform you need to support.